Oscars Walks Political Tightrope As Poll Shows Californians Wary Of Hollywood’s Influence

LOS ANGELES — If ever there were a year for the Academy Awards to make a political statement, it’s this one.

The show will unfurl Sunday amid a litany of domestic and international crises, including the war in Iran. And there’s a handful of nominated films with political messages, including Best Picture nominees “One Battle After Another,” about a former revolutionary’s struggle against a far-right military figure, and “Sinners,” a violent, supernatural depiction of the horrors of the Jim Crow South.

But if the presence of those projects gives presenters, nominees and host Conan O’Brien easy on-ramps to political discourse, a new poll by POLITICO and its partners suggests they’ll be walking a fine line.

Liberal voters in California — the epicenter of the entertainment industry — overwhelmingly say that actors, directors and other high-profile Hollywood professionals should be more vocal about their political beliefs, according to the UC Berkeley Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research-POLITICO poll, while few conservatives say so. But a plurality of voters — 48 percent — say the entertainment industry has too much influence on politics. And even in this heavily Democratic state, just 29 percent of voters believe Hollywood has a positive effect on American culture.

Don’t expect a protest to break out on the Dolby Theatre stage.

In O’Brien, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the group that puts on the Oscars — has selected a host whose off-kilter and self-deprecating brand of humor doesn’t lean heavily on politics, unlike past emcees such as Jon Stewart. And awards show producers typically seek to avoid scripted moments that are overtly political, lest they risk turning off a large portion of their audience. The film academy, for instance, denied a request by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to speak at the Oscars in 2022 and 2023.

Comedian Bruce Vilanch, who has written for at least 25 Academy Awards telecasts, said that he expected O’Brien to acknowledge the turbulent state of affairs, but in a manner that would “take the seriousness out of it for a minute” — and in a nonpartisan way.

That way, Vilanch said, “the show can go on and people can have a good time.” He said that O’Brien might focus on what is expected to be heightened security at the Oscars, owing to the possible threat of West Coast drone strikes by Iran.

“You can deflect it that way,” said Vilanch, before suggesting a joke. “You know, it's like, ‘It was so exciting, they were lining up to watch Timothée Chalamet get a cavity search.’”

O’Brien, for his part, has been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, even taking his TV show abroad to mock the president's proposals to buy Greenland and build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The comedian could face backlash if he avoids politics altogether. January’s Golden Globes drew criticism after host Nikki Glaser and presenters did not mention the killing of Renée Nicole Good by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis four days earlier.

“You can't ignore what's happening outside the doors of the Dolby — it would look totally disconnected from the world,” said Marc Adelman, a political consultant whose clients include entertainment industry figures and organizations. “But I do think how performers handle that, and how the producers choose to handle that, will either make it feel like it is an authentic experience, or a little bit contrived. That’s a very hard line to walk. I don't envy any of these hosts.”

That the Oscars — Hollywood’s most storied awards event — must strike a careful balance in a polarized world is not a surprise, and is reflected in the Citrin-POLITICO poll. Asked whether Hollywood is too liberal, 81 percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican agreed. Just 23 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democrat agreed.

The findings were notably different from a survey of POLITICO’s audience of key political and policy influencers in the state, including political staffers, lobbyists, policy advisers and others. In California, these figures skew more liberal and Democratic, which is reflected in the data. For example, among these influencers, 66 percent felt that high-profile entertainment industry professionals should be more vocal about their political beliefs. And only 26 percent of them felt that Hollywood is too liberal.

“Hollywood is perceived as liberal, and so the liberals and the Democrats are OK with that, and the Republicans are not,” said Jack Citrin, a University of California Berkeley political science professor and co-director of the poll. “If I owned a studio, I would want to know if the … vocal liberalism of people who are in my films — does that alienate people?”

The issue is fraught because some conservatives have argued that the liberal politics routinely espoused during the Oscars are a turn off to many — and they point to the broadcast’s flagging viewership as evidence of that. Indeed, ratings have been falling for decades. In 2000, the Oscars drew an audience of about 46 million people in the U.S. A year ago, the telecast delivered an audience of about 20 million people, up slightly from 2024.

“Performing politics when people want to be entertained is really a tough sell,” said Elizabeth Ashford, a Democratic political consultant who has worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kamala Harris, among others. “But, I think it's hard to ask people who have spent time, millions of dollars and their celebrity capital to make highly political movies, ‘Please don't be political at the show.’ That’s tough.”

Last year’s Oscars ceremony — hosted by O’Brien for the first time — was light on overtly political messages. Presenters and winners mentioned the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and O’Brien joked about Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin — but much of the attention focused on the recent LA wildfires.

Arguably the Academy Awards’ highest-profile — and most influential — political moment came in 1973, when Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American activist, declined Marlon Brando’s Best Actor award on his behalf and used the moment to protest Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans. Ever since then, said filmmaker and actor Mark Kassen, “politics have been part of the Oscars.” And Kassen, the writer, director and star of “PH-1,” a political thriller that debuts next month, is comfortable with that.

“I believe that artists should use their platform in a way that is authentic and important to them — they have earned that moment,” said Kassen, co-founder of A Starting Point, a civic engagement website that publishes interviews with elected officials. “I don't know if it's on me or anybody else to say how or when they should use their voice.”

There would be a recent precedent for the Oscars taking a political turn. February’s Grammy Awards were highly politicized, with several winners — including Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish and Kehlani — using their speeches to criticize federal immigration enforcement.

That issue may come up again on Sunday. Still, for actors and others, taking a stand is not without risk, said Matt Littman, a political consultant whose company HowLitt works in the nexus of politics and entertainment.

“You don't want the federal government threatening to take your show off the air, right? And you don't want the federal government doing an investigation of you. That's where people get a little bit scared — reasonably so,” said Littman, a former speechwriter for Joe Biden. “However, at this moment, Donald Trump is pretty unpopular throughout the country, and I think people would benefit from seeing folks stand up on the issues that we all know Trump is failing on, and one of those big issues is ICE.”

Some working in and around the entertainment industry said that they expect O’Brien to spend more time mining other politically adjacent current events — such as Paramount Skydance’s prospective $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal that could lead to mass layoffs in Hollywood — than focusing on pure politics.

Asked at a press conference on Wednesday about how politics would factor into his monologue, O’Brien said that his job as host is to “put people at ease, make people laugh.”

“I think that what's happening in the world will be reflected throughout the show,” he said. “My job is to always try and hit this very, very thin line, I think, between entertaining people and also acknowledging some of the realities. So it is a dance.”

As for the show’s producers, to get a sense of their potential mindset, consider the 2024 Oscars, which were hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, a longtime Trump irritant. During the ceremony, the then-former president took to social media to blast the comedian, suggesting there’d never been a “WORSE HOST” in the event’s history.

When Kimmel saw the message, he wanted to read it on air. But, he has said, the Oscars producers told him not to do it.

The host went for it anyway, reading Trump’s message from the stage before thanking him and joking, “Isn’t it past your jail time?”

The Dolby audience loved it.

For the POLITICO-Citrin poll, data come from parallel surveys of California voters and policy influencers, fielded by TrueDot, the AI-accelerated research platform, in collaboration with the Citrin Center at UC Berkeley and POLITICO. Interviews for the voter survey were conducted online in English and Spanish between Feb. 25 and March 3, among a sample of 1,220 registered voters selected at random by Verasight. Voter data were weighted using the Current Population Survey and data from the California Report of Registration.

From Feb. 24 to March 3, a parallel study was conducted in partnership with POLITICO among its audience of key political and policy influencers in California. The audience was defined based on job title and organizational affiliation and included state and local government employees, political staffers, lobbyists, policy advisers, consultants, business decision-makers and subject matter experts.

The margin of error is plus or minus 2.8 percent for the voter survey and plus or minus 3.7 percent for the influencers.